The bill doesn’t say it clear out, but in my opinion It creates a DMZ like North and South Korea, except [it’s] between the U.S. and Mexico—our third largest trading partner,” said Mark Noferi, an immigration law professor at Brooklyn Law School.
The bill has a provision that extends the concept of ‘the border’ to 100 miles [within] the southern U.S. border, but I think that DMZ could conceivably extend along our northern border as well, through most of Vermont as it now stands,” Noferi said.
The bill itself calls for increased training for any U.S. agents within 100 miles of “any land or marine border of the United States.” The also bill calls for more Border Patrol stations within the 100-mile band, for improved communications there, and for the use of surveillance drones.
I’d like it if politicians got the sense and the stones together to admit that after 4 decades that they haven’t been able to put the genie back in the bottle and end The War About Drugs©; that would defund some of the most vicious criminal organizations on either side of the border. After that, the USA would only have to worry about economic refugees.
…or would that hurt government patrons in the penal industrial complex?
Why private prisons don't want immigration reform
Lee Fang from The Nation joins Michael Shure inside “The War Room” to talk about how immigration reform could impact the private prison industry.
“He always identified with the underdog,” says Tommy Cash, Johnny’s youngest brother.
“He identified with the prisoners because many of them had served their sentences and had been rehabilitated in some cases, but were still kept there the rest of their lives. He felt a great empathy with those people.”
Incarceration Nation via Black Agenda Reports
The U.S. imprisons more people per capita than any country on earth, accounting for 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, despite having just five percent of the world’s population.
America currently holds over two million in prisons with double that number under supervision of parole and probation, according to federal government figures.
Mass incarceration consumes over $50-billion annually across America – money far better spent on creating jobs and improving education.
Under federal law persons with drug convictions like Garner are permanently barred from receiving financial aid for education, food stamps, welfare and publicly funded housing.
But only drug convictions trigger these exclusions under federal law. Violent bank robbers, white-collar criminals like Wall Street scam artists who steal billions, and even murderers who’ve done their time do not face the post-release deprivations slapped on those with drug convictions on their records, including those imprisoned for simple possession, and not major drug sales.
“Academics see this topic of mass incarceration as numbers, but for millions it is their daily lives,” said Princeton conference panelist Dr. Khalilah Brown-Dean of Yale University.
Exclusions mandated by federal laws compound the legal deprivations of rights found in the laws of most states, such as barring ex-felons from jobs and even stripping ex-felons of their right to vote.
“Mass incarceration raises questions of protecting and preserving democracy,” Dr. Brown-Dean said, citing the estimated five-million-plus Americans barred from voting by such felony disenfranchisement laws.
Many of those felony disenfranchisement laws date from measures enacted in the late 1800s which were devised specifically to bar blacks from voting, as a way to preserve America’s apartheid.
During the 2000 presidential election Republican officials in Florida fraudulently manipulated that state’s anti-felon voting law to bar tens of thousands of blacks from voting. For example, many people with common names like John Smith who shared their name with a felon were also barred from voting, despite having clear records.
Yet George W. Bush won by Florida – the state where his brother Jeb served as Governor – by 537 votes. That victory in the state where George W.’s brother Jeb served as governor sent him to the White House.
Policies creating barriers to things like education and employment make it “increasingly difficult” for persons recently released from prison to “remain crime-free” according to a report released earlier this year by the Smart on Crime Coalition.
More than 60 percent of the two-million-plus people in American prisons are racial and ethnic minorities.
“The U.S. imprisons more than South Africa did under apartheid. A nation that promotes democracy has a racial caste in its prisons. We must break that caste system,” said the special guest speaker at the “Imprisonment” conference, Pennsylvania Death Row Journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who telephoned from prison.
Racism is written all over the economically/socially debilitating practices embedded in mass incarceration.
A recent University of Wisconsin study found that 17 percent of white ex-con job seekers received interviews, compared to only five percent of black ex-con job seekers – a race-based disparity that is additionally devastating for people of color like Garner.
Ohio State University Law Professor Michelle Alexander, the featured speaker at that Princeton conference streamed live on the internet, said a major reason why imprisonment rates soared during the past four decades despite decreases in crime rates is anti-crime policies craftily manipulated by conservative Republican officials for political purposes.Harsh anti-crimes policies of the 1970s and 1980s were largely a “punitive backlash” to advances of the Civil Rights Movement, said Alexander, author of the hugely popular 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
Pennsylvania’s prison population, for example, soared from 8,243 in 1980 to 51,487 in 2010, while the California prison population leapt during the same period from 23,264 to over 170,000.
Incarceration costs are particularly obscene when compared to college costs.
A report released in January 2011 by Pennsylvania’s auditor general that noted the Keystone State now spends $32,059 annually to imprison one person…a cost that exceeds the annual $20,074 tuition for the MBA degree program at Penn State University.
A report released in January 2010 by a UCLA professor noted that the Golden State spends over $48,000 annually to imprison one person, more than four times the tuition cost of UCLA for a California resident. Back in 1980, California spent more of its state budget on higher education than on prisons, but that had reversed by 2010, with more of that state’s budget going for prisons than for higher education.
America’s corrosive War on Drugs – a “war” that basically ignores drug kingpins – has devastated black families, author/professor Alexander said.
“A black child today is less likely to be raised in a two-parent household than during slavery,” she said. “In major urban areas almost one-half of black men have criminal records. Thus they face a lifetime of legalized discrimination,” encompassing exclusions from employment and access to financial assistance required to secure a viable quality of life.
Africa-Americans are 13 percent of America’s population and 14 percent of the nation’s drug users but are 37 percent of persons arrested for drugs and 56 percent of the inmates in state prisons for drug offenses, noted the 2009 congressional testimony of Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project and a conference panelist.
Both ex-felon Herman Garner and Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr., chair of Princeton’s Center for African American Studies, which hosted the conference, expressed similar views on the impacts of mass incarceration.
These infographs are great. What better way to put this shitty epidemic into perspective. Look at how disproportionately it affects Blacks and Hispanics versus white people. Look at that shit. Slavery may be abolished, but this is not.
This needs tags and Californians need to vote for Propositions 34 and 36.
250th Texas prisoner executed under Rick Perry
November 2, 2012When Donnie Roberts received a lethal injection Wednesday night from the state of Texas, he became the 250th prisoner to be executed during Rick Perry’s tenure as governor. Roberts, a former crack addict who murdered his girlfriend in 2003, became another symbol among a list of striking statistics that evidence, as the Guardian put it, Perry’s “continued enthusiasm for punishing murder with death.”
- Perry has presided over more executions than any other governor in U.S. modern history (partly owing to his long tenure of 12 years).
- George W. Bush, Perry’s predecessor, oversaw 152 executions, breaking the record for the highest rate of executions while governor (from 1995 to 2000).
- Perry has granted 31 death row commutations, 28 of them owing to a 2005 Supreme Court decision prohibiting the execution of minors.
- In 2001, Perry vetoed abillthat banned the execution of the mentally disabled. Considerations in Texas of whether someone is incompetent for execution are based on inspiration from the fictional character Lennie from Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” On October 2012, 44-year-old Jonathan Green was given the lethal injection for murder, despite his attorneys’ protests that he was mentally ill and incompetent for execution. In August this year, Texas executed Marvin Wilson despite his having an IQ of 61 and being medically diagnosed as “mentally retarded.”
- In 2011,Texas executed Mexican national Humberto Garcia, despite the fact that he had been denied his right to assistance from the Mexican consulate—a move which many legal experts worried was a violation of international law. “Texas is not bound by a foreign court’s ruling,” Perry spokeswoman Katherine Cesinger said when questioned about the matter.
- In 1994, 17-year-old Napoleon Beazley shot John Luttig during an attempted carjacking. The New Republic reported, “John Luttig’s son, Michael Luttig, went on to become a U.S. District Judge. When the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, three justices—Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and David Souter—had to recuse themselves because they had relationships with Michael. The remaining six justices voted 3-3 on Beazley’s appeal, with the tie resulting in a rejection. Beazley was executed in 2002. The Supreme Court laterbanned executions for offenders under 18in 2005.”
- In 2004 — in perhaps the Governor’s most controversial execution case — Perry refused to grant a stay of execution to Cameron Todd Willingham, who was sentenced to death for murdering his three children with arson. Although the governor was sent a report by an arson expert casting serious doubt on the evidence against Todd Willingham, Perry allowed the execution to go ahead. (The case became the subject of David Grann’s famous New Yorkerinvestigation.
- There are approximately 285 offenders presently on Texas death row — six of them since the 1970s.
because it needs tags and California needs to vote for Prop. 34 and 36 on Tuesday.
Stupid Things College Educated People Say
Really, have either of them gone to visit someone in jail or prison?
I have: these low-rent gladiator schools are designed to make people that end up penned in them dumb as rocks. Having your franchise taken away from you ranks pretty far down the list from things you care about if you have to worry about getting jammed with a shiv on your way to the showers.
Jess might have not made it out of her ivory tower to understand this. Considering that Fairy is Mexicana, she’d get a more meaningful response if she talked to a friend-of-a-friend about this.
U.S. citizens don’t need a passport to visit The Prison Capital of The World.
